Bosvogels

For many people in Hong Kong, talk of endangered species conjures up images of wildlife whose natural habitats are “out there”, somewhere far away – such as giant pandas in the bamboo forests of Sichuan province, polar bears in the Arctic and miniature monkeys in the Brazilian rainforest. If, like me, you are a birdwatcher, however, the list of threatened species feels far closer to home.

Of the four subspecies of willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii), three have breeding grounds in California and are listed as endangered by the state's Department of Fish and Wildlife. Because the southwestern subspecies, one of those three subspecies, is listed as endangered by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, ecologists and conservation biologists have studied the birds closely for decades.

A while back we took note of a study that showed populations of airborne insects have declined by 76 percent in protected areas in Germany over the past 27 years. Part of the picture was that the disappearance of bugs is likely to pose problems for other animals in the food chain. Now a recent study by French scientists revealed that bird populations in France’s farming areas have declined by more than one-third in the past 17 years. Both resident and migrant species have decreased sharply.

There has been decline in the population of birds in Athagarh forest division in Cuttack. At least 16,948 birds were sighted in the forest division during the bird census which was carried out in the first week of January. The number of birds counted this year is much less against last year's 19,476. Adding to it, not a single migratory bird has been spotted in the region this time.

As their common name implies, the woodcocks (Scolopax rusticola) are woodland birds. They feed at night or in the evenings, searching for invertebrates in soft ground with their long bills. The population of British woodcock is now so imperilled that a game-shoot owner turned conservationist has started a national campaign to save the dwindling species. Figures indicate the number of breeding woodcock males has shrunk to possibly fewer than 55,000, down 30 per cent since 2003. Experts suggest that numbers could have been affected by collapsing insect populations.

The wild turkey population peaked around 2001 at around 6.7 million birds in North America. But in the years since, it has dropped by about 15 percent. The eastern wild turkey—the most abundant subspecies, which reigns east of the Mississippi River—appears to be declining across parts of the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest. In New York, hunters in the western part of the state were the first to notice the difference.

Birds living and breeding on the UK’s farmland have seen numbers decline by almost a tenth in five years, official figures show. Farmland bird populations have declined by 56% since 1970, largely due to agricultural changes including the loss of mixed farming, a switch to autumn sowing of crops, a reduction in hay meadows and the stripping out of hedgerows.

New Zealand’s charismatic kea (Nestor notabilis) - and 2017‘s Bird of the Year - has just been reclassified to “endangered” by global conservation group BirdLife International. The alpine parrot was upgraded from “vulnerable” to “endangered” in BirdLife International’s reassessment of the threat status of birds for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).